Is the White House manipulating the media through Media Matters?

posted at 9:15 am on February 13, 2012 by Ed Morrissey

The Daily Caller has a multipart exposé on David Brock and Media Matters which will surprise … well, probably no one who reads this site. Speaking with former and current employees, Tucker Carlson, Vince Coglianese, Alex Pappas, and Will Rahn paint a picture of Brock as paranoid and out of control, but still supremely effective at getting his message out through the mainstream media:

Extensive interviews with a number of Brock’s current and former colleagues at Media Matters, as well as with leaders from across the spectrum of Democratic politics, reveal an organization roiled by its leader’s volatile and erratic behavior and struggles with mental illness, and an office where Brock’s executive assistant carried a handgun to public events in order to defend his boss from unseen threats.

Yet those same interviews, as well as a detailed organizational planning memo obtained by The Daily Caller, also suggest that Media Matters has to a great extent achieved its central goal of influencing the national media.

Well, in the interests of full disclosure, I often carry a handgun to public events — where it is legal to do so — thanks to threats that turned out to be real enough to prosecute. Then again, I’m not funded by gun-grabbers like George Soros, either. Given the personal attacks that Media Matters is given to making, I have no doubt that at least a few of their threats are not “unseen” as in “unreal,” but it’s more than a little hypocritical to carry around a concealed weapon (presumably illegally, especially in Washington DC) while supporting tougher gun-control regulations.

The DC has plenty of juicy and salacious anecdotes about Brock, but the real story is how successful Brock has become in shaping the narrative of the national media. MSNBC is a given, but it’s also become a hard-Left backwater. Media Matters has done better than MSNBC in setting the table:

But MSNBC executives weren’t the only ones talking regularly to Media Matters.

“The HuffPo guys were good, Sam Stein and Nico [Pitney],” remembered one former staffer. “The people at Huffington Post were always eager to cooperate, which is no surprise given David’s long history with Arianna [Huffington].”

“Jim Rainey at the LA Times took a lot of our stuff,” the staffer continued. “So did Joe Garofoli at the San Francisco Chronicle. We’ve pushed stories to Eugene Robinson and E.J. Dionne [at the Washington Post]. Brian Stelter at the New York Times was helpful.”

“Ben Smith [formerly of Politico, now at BuzzFeed.com] will take stories and write what you want him to write,” explained the former employee, whose account was confirmed by other sources. Staffers at Media Matters “knew they could dump stuff to Ben Smith, they knew they could dump it at Plum Line [Greg Sargent’s Washington Post blog], so that’s where they sent it.”

Smith, who refused to comment on the substance of these claims, later took to Twitter to say that he has been critical of Media Matters.

However, their real success has been accessing the halls of power, especially the Obama White House:

A group with the ability to shape news coverage is of incalculable value to the politicians it supports, so it’s no surprise that Media Matters has been in regular contact with political operatives in the Obama administration. According to visitor logs, on June 16, 2010, Brock and then-Media Matters president Eric Burns traveled to the White House for a meeting with Valerie Jarrett, arguably the president’s closest adviser. Recently departed Obama communications director Anita Dunn returned to the White House for the meeting as well.

It’s not clear what the four spoke about — no one in the meeting returned repeated calls for comment — but the apparent coordination continued. “Anita Dunn became a regular presence at the office,” says someone who worked there. Then-president of Media Matters, Eric Burns, “lunched with her, met with her and chatted with her frequently on any number of matters.”

Media Matters also began a weekly strategy call with the White House, which continues, joined by the liberal Center for American Progress think tank. Jen Psaki, Obama’s deputy communications director, was a frequent participant before she left for the private sector in October 2011.

Every Tuesday evening, meanwhile, a representative from Media Matters attends the Common Purpose Project meeting at the Capitol Hilton on 16th Street in Washington, where dozens of progressive organizations formulate strategy, often with a representative from the Obama White House.

The actual story here might be the reverse of how Carlson et al frame it here. This sounds as though the White House uses Brock and Media Matters to conduct a proxy war against its perceived enemies in the news media and to push its propaganda out through the MSM. The DC’s descriptions of attacks on reporters and media outlets who don’t fall in line would make MMFA a very valuable pitbull for Jarrett and Obama, and one with some plausible deniability, at least until now. This should really be the screaming red flag in the article, rather than some of the salacious tidbits about Brock.

Interestingly, just a few days ago someone else connected the White House to Media Matters, along with a warning that their relationship could cost Obama the next election. The name of that right-wing nut? Alan Dershowitz:

Much more newsworthy than the silly spitballs Blumenthal threw with his screaming article was Dershowitz’s conviction that Blumenthal and his buddies at Media Matters (a media watchdog organization affiliated with the Democratic party and which has recently been widely accused of engaging in anti-Semitism) were going to cost this president the election.

Asked at the pre-event press conference whether he had seen Blumenthal’s article, Dershowitz’s immediate and angry response was: “I have, and let me tell you, Max Blumenthal and Media Matters will be singlehandedly responsible for [Obama] losing this election. They [the Democrats] cannot win the election and keep this affiliation with them [Media Matters].”

When shown this statement, all Blumenthal could muster (via Twitter) was that “I haven’t been at mmfa [Media Matters] since 2007.” It was pointed out that Blumenthal’s then-current Facebook page listed him as working for the “progressive organization Media Matters for America.” Blumenthal did not respond, but he has since altered his Facebook page so that only those “lucky” enough to be his FB friends can see it (although you can still look at the dozens of pictures he posts of himself there).

Dershowitz could be wrong, though. It might be that the only thing keeping Obama competitive for a re-election bid is Media Matters.

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When will Congress investigate this illegal conduct. It is unlawful to intentionally interfer with contractual relationships. Does anyone know how the right to free speach interacts with intentionally interferring with someone’s contractual relationship with sponsors?

For some time now there seems to be a coordinated dissmenination of rhectorical news in the media. When a certain even occurs nearly all press outlets will use the same adjectives in describing it. Rush Limbaugh has shown this several time during what he calls the “media montage” segment. If this kind of coordination occured in other industries some would consider it a monopoly.

The people in these institutions that engage in this are corrupt–they’re sellouts–they are NOT professionals. A man who sits down and is fed a story that was produced by some “news clearinghouse” and fed to them by the White House and contains a narrative that the White House wants to get out is not a professional.

Whatever. Lefties all assume that FoxNews coordinates with some Vast Right Wing conspiracy… the Koch Brothers… if not the White House itself (when Bush was there). But a free and independent press only means that some will be aligned with a White House and others will not. Nothing new. Jefferson and Adams each had their own media too.

Back in the day, the White House and the federal government was at the mercy of the media. Nowadays, the leviathan has grown so large that it is self-perpetuating. WH info–>MMFA–> news outlets—>news outlet people —>WH jobs

its a wash, rinse, spit, repeat cycle. A news vortex, spinning and spinning and very tightly controlled. F&F news doesn’t get in, nor does it get out. Bad news doesn’t see the light of day. It is the Memory Hole and Ministry of Truth all wrapped in one.

George Orwell didn’t write a dystopian novel, he wrote a how-to manual.

Exposes on the relationship between the White House, Fox and the conservative media have found equally entangled relationships. Why is anyone surprised by this? When the media model is ratings driven, which means corporate sponsorship driven, of course they are going to go along with whichever Administration favors corporatism. Do you think the “unprecedented” embedding of media outlets and the armed forces during the early years of Iraq were a coincidence? The media hasn’t been “independent” for years. But they aren’t marxist, they are corporatist which means they tend to favor whomever is currently in power.

David Brock is so weird. First a hatchet man for the Right, then a hatchet man for the Left? Who does that? He made his bones writing about Bill Clinton’s affairs, which opened the whole Paula Jones can of worms, when as a homosexual Brock has his own personal sexual life he certainly didn’t want to get out. How could he go from hard Right to hard Left like that? If he didn’t like being a hatchet man for the Right, then why did he do it? The only other one I can think of who did that is Arianna Huffington, and perhaps she was conservative only because her husband (who later declared himself gay) ran for the US Senate (CA-R) as a Repub.

Brock and Huffington … what are their personal values? Did either of them explain why they switched from Right to Left?

The Democrats are the pimps, and the MSM are the hookers!
Has something changed in the last couple of decades?
The pimps seem to beat the hookers a little more, and people don’t seem alarmed and turn their heads! It’s acceptable!

Years ago Connie Chung was being interviewed and the question asked to her was, “How do you know what news to report?” her answer was, ” we run it all through the White House.” Connie was not seen on TV for at least two years.

Sources in the foreign press in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv said that other media were cutting back in Jerusalem and following the money and moving resources to the Gulf. CNN seems to be leading the pack, hosting many shows out of its new studios in Abu Dhabi City as well as CNN’s Arabic shows from Dubai City, also in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
So economic considerations, alongside politics, may explain the Jerusalem dismissals, but they sit in the long shadow of CNN’s record of sucking up to Arab extremists, like Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat, and trying to ingratiate itself with both.
Well after the Gulf war, CNN’s news director Eason Jordan admitted trading soft coverage of Saddam in return for exclusive access in Iraq. So it might be a good idea to be wary of CNN claims of not discriminating against Jews or sucking up to Arabs.

Personal connections and at least two common friends have made it clear to me that Brock has serious mental issues. Very serious. Mis-medicated (and taking them only on an erratic basis to beging with) issues.

I always thought they overdramatized this at least a bit because he seemed able to hold it together in public. I guess the masque was even more thorough, albeit flimsy, than I thought.

It’s not that MMFA is a mechanism for turning the MSM into propaganda tools that’s the biggest story, its that anti-semitism and gross demagoguery that are the chosen very frequent methods of attack. The President attacks “bankers” on practically a daily basis as the cause of our economic problems and the Israelis are blamed for our foreign issues. Overt anti-Semitic attacks are the daily bread of Media Matters and the real scandal is that the White House is leading that strategy.

Do you think the “unprecedented” embedding of media outlets and the armed forces during the early years of Iraq were a coincidence? The media hasn’t been “independent” for years. But they aren’t marxist, they are corporatist which means they tend to favor whomever is currently in power.

libfreeordie on February 13, 2012 at 9:31 AM

Hogwash, and you know it.

al-AP, otherwise known as the Associated Press, “favorded” the Bush Administration in 2004 by suing the White House to force Bush to release all of his military records. At the same time, they happily covered up his Democrat “opponent’s” military records.

Obviously, information is quite a valuable commodity–that goes without question. What is it that drives the left to build such an enormous, complex apparatus to control information. I mean, if their ideas were valid, or reasonable, then people would see them as such and agree with them. That simply must not be, thus they are relegated to build these back-channel, information manipulating schemes to a)produce b)reduce c)promote d)demote e)validate or f)repeat various snippets of information as a means to influence people and their behavior. Appears a bit paranoid.

The Iraq war was a bi-partisan engagement. The dems voted in favor (unlike Libya – Obama’s personally approved war). As soon as the dems jumped ship, so did the media.

DHChron on February 13, 2012 at 9:44 AM

And yet wouldn’t the leftwing marxist media oppose the war on principle? Oh wait, perhaps they are (as I just said) in favor of power and currying favor and being invited to parties. Shocking! I don’t think you can really show any evidence that the media was opposed to the war until Democrats joined the war mondering debacle that was the 2002 authorization of force vote.

al-AP, otherwise known as the Associated Press, “favorded” the Bush Administration in 2004 by suing the White House to force Bush to release all of his military records. At the same time, they happily covered up his Democrat “opponent’s” military records.

F-

Del Dolemonte on February 13, 2012 at 9:48 AM

I like that you put “opponent” in quotation marks, you’re starting to recognize the similarities between the two parties.

even if Bush had tried to manipulate news through Fox, that’s merely 1 outlet—and its the “Israel of all news outlets” FWIW. That is certainly a world apart from having a tight-fisted control over major newspapers, 3 major news networks, and at least 2 cable news channels.

I guess I was the only one who saw the media’s shameless boosterism during the buildup and first year of the Iraq war…..

libfreeordie on February 13, 2012 at 9:41 AM

You must mean the very first NY Times editorial after the war started:

From here, the sound of the war that began last night is inaudible. As veterans realize and almost every writer on the subject of war has reminded us, the experience of this new, unwanted war will be unknowable except among those who will be there for the fighting.

What WH doesn’t try to help control their narrative by getting news help? Any program, message or other bit needs to get widespread attention and the WH would be silly to not try to get it out there in the format that it is intended–I see no problem with that one bit. However, this WH is unique in that “message control” means that, aside from the message format, there is no issue with the content. Any problems arising after the message goes downrange–ie, is released, is merely attributed to “poor messaging” and not to content. That is fundamentally fatal flaw that presumes that the informational formatting of the content alone, and not the content itself, can be flawed and the corrective schemes of the MMFA/ABC/Time etc can ultimately institute corrective remedies to improve the message, thus the response.

Yeah I remember the Iraq war media, daily body counts, embedded reporters showing anything that bleeds, sitting congressmen calling the troops murderers and the media uncritically convicting them in the court of public opinion (the Haditha Marines), I remember how they quietly swept scandal after scandal under the rug. Gitmo was never mentioned, those unsupervised kids who “tortured” prisoners were all explained away as “the fog of war” and “war makes people to horrible things”, it was never the direct responsibility of the President. In fact I can barely recall the last President’s name.

How is that different from the Bush whitehouse manipulating the media through Faux?

liberal4life on February 13, 2012 at 9:49 AM

You assert it. You have no proof. This is an article with proof. Hannity says he’s never followed or even gotten any talking points from the Bush White House. Proof? You just say stuff. That’s why you have no credibility here. It’s a waste of time to read or reply to your stuff.

But they aren’t marxist, they are corporatist which means they tend to favor whomever is currently in power.

libfreeordie

Delusional. And I know the media love to now flog themselves about how they were complicit in the Iraq war run up, blah, blah, blah. But that is just another way for them to keep up their stupid meme that Bush lied! We were duped! Oh, he’s evil for lying to us!! No, he didn’t. They got leaked all the same data and reports that Saddam was making nuclear weapons. Perhaps that’s why they weren’t so opposed to it. And if Bush hadn’t told Saddam for a friggin year that we were going to invade, there would have been recoverable weapons. Instead, they went to Syria and here we are left w/the retarded, lefty chant, “Bush lied. People died.” Preach it, libfree!!

Goodness … David Brock looks like a corpse with no teeth. I guess working for the left ages you dramatically. He could be a zombie for all I know.

darwin on February 13, 2012 at 9:30 AM

I can believe he’s flaky and aging prematurely for it. He opportunistically works for the American Spectator to make a name for himself. Then comes out as the leftist we can be sure he always was. He’s gay. Homosexuality is, unfortunately, often a symptom of an unstable condition of mind. That’s been documented.

You’d have a hard time convincing me the Democrats don’t control the message coming out of D.C. Look at the way every media outlet (I say this with the automatic exemption of Fox News, which may be the only honest news outfit around now) attacks the tea party! Are you going to tell me there isn’t one media outlet that recognizes what brought about the tea party, who the tea party really is, and why it’s a good thing? We have 3 networks plus cable outlets doing the news, yet there isn’t a dimes worth of difference between them, when it comes to a take on a news story. Does anyone actually believe they all reach the exact same point all by themselves? Does anyone really believe they are in such lockstep that 8 different news organizations can see an event and view it exactly the same way? Common sense should tell you that’s just not possible.

Obviously, information is quite a valuable commodity–that goes without question. What is it that drives the left to build such an enormous, complex apparatus to control information. I mean, if their ideas were valid, or reasonable, then people would see them as such and agree with them. That simply must not be, thus they are relegated to build these back-channel, information manipulating schemes to a)produce b)reduce c)promote d)demote e)validate or f)repeat various snippets of information as a means to influence people and their behavior. Appears a bit paranoid.

ted c on February 13, 2012 at 9:49 AM

It’s not about ideas ,it’s about power. That’s why rinos too are seduced by the liberals.

Almost all of the media is in the tank for Obama and have been since he started running for president. This is why it’s going to be so difficult to defeat him in November, no matter who the Republicans run.

so, the_nile posits that if you control the information, you control the power.

I wonder how that works for “education” as well? One would think that if you control both daily information, as well as the processing of new information and learning that that would also be a pathway to power as well. Have liberals also deposited themselves at the fountainheads of education? Well, lookie there, that certainly happens to be the case in both public school and university level education. Quite a stranglehold that they’ve got on those institutions as well.

Yes, yes they are. Based upon what I’ve read about Media Matters and it’s various “involvements,” yes, I’d say that they’re working on behalf of or in collusion with the White House, such as Valerie Jarrett, Barack Obama and Anita Dunn may call it.

Almost all of the media is in the tank for Obama and have been since he started running for president. This is why it’s going to be so difficult to defeat him in November, no matter who the Republicans run.

talkingpoints on February 13, 2012 at 10:08 AM

It’s an “agenda.” The Left established the agenda, scouted out an available candidate and then hoisted that candidate while pursuing their agenda (which candidate is an emissary of). Candidate, Obama, gets to feel like it’s all about him but the fact is, he’s part of that agenda.